The answer I'm guessing is probably not, as the users that ask these types of questions don't care much for researching questions and putting effort in to asking.

My suggestion would be for new users, or those with a history of asking poor questions based on closure rate or down votes. I'm sure SO have algorithms to identify and flag the types of users I'm talking about.

Some of the issues around poor questions are:

Lack of research effort

Lack of any code

Lack of details that give the question some context

While these questions will probably end up in the "Low Quality" review queue, could additional prompts make some of these users think for a second before clicking "Post Your Question".

When asking a question we currently see prompts for:

Could additional checks be carried out on the post to check for inclusion of links (research effort), inclusion of code and length of post. I know there is a 30 character limit already, but there's probably very few questions that would be "on-topic" and "specific" with under 100-200 characters (arbitrary values). This is by no means a definitive list of the checks that could be carried, more a starting point.

The prompt could look something like this with only the relevant bullet points listed (orange as a warning / not an error):

You will also see a checkbox that they would be required to click before the the question could be posted. Not sure if there would be any value storing how many times this was checked on top of what SO already do to flag low value users.

After posting a question yesterday that included a JSFiddle, I saw the following prompt before I added a code snippet:

I'd forgotten about this prompt, but this is the kind of pre-post validation that I'm referring to. It's clear that it checks for both a URL and code, which are 2 of the initial checks I suggested for users targeted by the warning prompt.

Once the question textarea loses focus, a call is made to: http://stackoverflow.com/posts/validate-body, which returns an array of errors, so I would just extend this to also return an array of warnings based on the post body and the status (rep, flagged, on a warning etc) of the user making it.

While some of these have been suggested as behind the scenes checks that have been added to the algorithm to feed in to the Low Quality Review Queue, again could they not be used to warn users before they post?

I understand from the podcast, they don't want to highlight all of the things that flag questions as low quality to prevent people circumventing the checks, but they state that they want to block and warn users where they feel that the user can learn something.

I also like @Dukeling's suggestion for the rewording at the bottom of the prompt to be more specific about the consequences of ignoring the prompt:

I understand that, without the above, I may be prevented from getting answers to my question and taking a step towards getting banned from the site.

I noticed that it displayed a warning prompt to the user, as you can see below. I'm wondering whether this feature request for additional prompting is being implemented to an extent, or is this existing functionality that I've not seen before?

New users are already sent to How to Ask and are required to tick "yes, I have read it" or something like that. If they're not going to read that, I don't think they'll read this either.
–
Qantas 94 HeavyJun 10 '14 at 13:37

7

@Qantas94Heavy Having never been in that situation I wasn't aware of that. Although this would add an extra level of validation, based on what they were about to post. Like I said in the post, "make some of these users think for a second" not all :-)
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TannerJun 10 '14 at 13:42

3

Sorry, my bad (I think that was the old link). I don't think that's particularly harmful, but I'd remove the checkbox from there as they already have one from before.
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Qantas 94 HeavyJun 10 '14 at 13:43

44

I'd say the more hoops to jump through the better. Make them tick as many boxes as they've had down votes * 5 possibly?
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TannerJun 10 '14 at 13:45

5

I think users shouldn't just close down bad questions, we should comment and be kind enough to ask them to re-organise their question
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Daniel CheungJun 10 '14 at 14:21

14

As we do. Again, and again, and again. And again.
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VeedracJun 10 '14 at 14:22

20

@Renan Questions without code or links to resources have accumulated thousands of upvotes. They can't be that bad. Personally, I think the worst questions that the site gets contain code. They contain lots of code. A huge wall of code. And usually only very little text. "My app is crashing. How do I fix this?". If you ask me, those are a way bigger problem than questions that only use plain text to ask about a concept.
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Matthias BauchJun 10 '14 at 14:24

1

SO should check for errors like "this .I" see that a lot in the OpenCV tag from new user lately. Also a post without linebreak and more than 6 lines should have a warning.
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Sebastian SchmitzJun 10 '14 at 14:26

1

@MatthiasBauch this suggestion isn't intended to combat all of the issues as there are cases where it might be a valid question. It's more to encourage users that post questions that might be deemed poor to simply review the suggestions on the prompt before they can post it.
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TannerJun 10 '14 at 14:28

12

The stackoverflow.com/help/how-to-ask page is a long wall of good advice that these folks are unlikely to read, where as this is a simple checklist that would be quick to read and digest
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TannerJun 10 '14 at 14:30

Just thinking now, if the user chose to ignore flags, that the closing threshold could be reduced to make it easier to close. So if they fail to add code and people choose the "lacks sufficient information to diagnose" reason, then it would require fewer votes to close?
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TannerJun 10 '14 at 14:45

3

How would this be implemented, exactly? I think your faith in the ability of computers to detect laziness (or whatever) is overly optimistic. Do the users who matter (brand new users who already "read" the "ask" instructions and checked the "I understand" box) know what downvote and closure means?
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Robert Harvey♦Jun 10 '14 at 15:16

8

Links were never a requirement of asking a question on Stack Overflow, and shouldn't be. Research effort, in general, is overrated; if a question is clear and answerable, then answer it, regardless of the "amount of effort shown." Or, find a duplicate to close it against.
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Robert Harvey♦Jun 10 '14 at 15:51

3

@RobertHarvey this isn't to suggest links should be a requirement at all, just to hint that it might be useful to show "similar posts that didn't solve your issue"
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TannerJun 10 '14 at 15:53

5 Answers
5

Me want. Me want now.

For all the people who think How To Ask is sufficient, there is a very crucial difference.

How To Ask has the fundamental problem of not being personal. It's a chunk of text that gives you some tips. It's not enough to persuade anyone who just wants to get their question answered now because my question is important. Because it's due tomorrow.

A box that basically reads

You aren't going to get help unless you follow our guidelines.

is far better because it's personal. They don't care about us. They care about themselves.

They're not going to spend time reading a wall of text because they need the answer now. We're not the ones who are getting favours here.

When asking for clarifications, we'll often get the response of "Yes! I'll do that now!"

It doesn't matter that they've been asked before. They only care when it's a personal request. This makes it one. They'll care when the things we ask them to do are clearly linked to the answers they get.

this is along the lines of my thinking, that a few dynamic checks prior to allowing the post is better than a long page of advice, even if it only affect a small percentage of posts.
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TannerJun 10 '14 at 14:36

You are assuming these people read. They'll skim it enough to figure out that they have to click the checkbox that lets them post.
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BlorgbeardJun 11 '14 at 2:18

5

@Blorgbeard that may be the case for some, but some users may actually want to learn how to post properly or rectify their behaviour. This would add some simple validation that reinforces the "how to ask" page. If it included text similar to that specified in Dukeling's answer meta.stackoverflow.com/a/260117/57475 and they continue to ignore, then on their head be it! I'm aware that this won't solve the issue, but it could make a little, minuscule dent for very little technical effort.
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TannerJun 11 '14 at 7:33

I don't know, wouldn't the users who want to learn just read the faq? There are already prominent links to "help" etc for users who actually care.
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BlorgbeardJun 11 '14 at 9:05

@Blorgbeard that's perhaps true for some users maybe but it's the wall of text vs a few bullet points, as mentioned in my first comment on this answer
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TannerJun 11 '14 at 12:14

Give the user more in their face advice

In my opinion, that is a superb suggestion. This is something that could be applied not just to users with a bad history, but any user who has yet to add very much quality content to the site (read: include new users). It could be rep based or something like the user not having enough upvoted questions yet. Warning the user that their question is not likely to be well received encourages them to take the guidelines more seriously. No, it won't reach everyone, but that's not the point of features like this. The point is to reach those who are willing to pay attention and do a good job. StackOverflow isn't a good fit for people who aren't willing to do that, and those questions should continue to be closed and downvoted. In other words, this is a feature to help users become good users, not a feature to filter out "bad" users.

One would imagine that the message could actually be based on the content of the question. The question doesn't contain any links? Suggest to the user that they provide links to other resources they've already consulted. The question doesn't contain any code? Suggest that most questions should contain some code that demonstrates the problem. Obviously, these particularly qualities are specific to StackOverflow, so I don't know how or if they could be extended to be useful to other sites. I think that basing the message on the content (and therefore making the message different every time) goes even further to "personalize" the message as Veedrac mentions. This shouldn't block the question, since as mentioned in the comments, very valid and useful questions lack these things sometimes, but the vast majority of good questions do include these sorts of content.

Get even more in the face of users whose history is negative

This is where the checkbox comes in. What you're trying to do is continually get the user's attention and warn them that the quality of their content so far is subpar. The purpose is two fold, here. The first purpose is again to get the attention of users who want to do a good job; it gives automatic, constant negative feedback for not doing a good job. The second purpose is that it becomes easier to identify users who simply don't care, since they're being continually warned that they're not doing what's required of them.

Whether either of these would really be effective, I'm not entirely sure, but I like the ideas. A little "Help" drop down in the corner is so easy to ignore and forget about, and having to dig through all those documents never felt very effective to me.

That sounds reasonable to me, I just wrote that piece off the top of my head as some form of warning. I also meant to write "context" instead of "content" on the third bullet point but was too lazy to edit the html again and do another screen grab.
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TannerJun 10 '14 at 22:28

I posted pretty much the same idea a few years ago (here). It is so easy to implement I don't see any reason not to try it. Being a UI designer as well as a chess player, I have found the concept of "board blindness" very useful in approaching UI design. Board blindness occurs when a player sees some immediate move, say a hanging piece, and consequently does not take the entire board into consideration. Software users do the same thing: they want what they want and are often blind to the rest of the screen.

Here's my image version of it (placeholder verbiage - would be expanded slightly/no ellipses, etc.) It places the help message directly in their area of interest: the question area.

I like the idea, but the problem with adding the checklist as a placeholder is that it's gone once the user starts writing their question; there's no way for them to check off the checklist after they've written the question, but before they post it.
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MattJun 10 '14 at 16:19

7

tldr. No, really, people will not read it. People will not read anything they can quickly dismiss. They will, at best, scan it quickly for keywords that might help them get rid of it.
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meagarJun 10 '14 at 16:33

2

I agree with @Matt and meagar. An alternative to your proposal would be to provide an actual template for the users to fill in the gaps, with some section headings like: Overview of Problem, Code, Research & What I've Tried. It may prompt more thought about question structure but the likelihood is it will still get deleted and replaced with a crappy question. I think my suggestion would provide slightly more consequence if they actively ignore the prompt and tick the box and still get down voted.
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TannerJun 11 '14 at 13:16

This is a frequent subject of conversation, and I still think that a guided process is needed. I don't think prompts go far enough, we should endeavor to weed out the immediately obvious duplicates as much as possible in a way that funnels people to answers.

Low quality questions are very often duplicates that are poorly worded, making the duplication less obvious. I think this is caused by two factors:

1) people don't search before they ask,

2) the search mechanics aren't the greatest

Most simple questions have already been asked and answered in some form, and most bad questions are simple questions with bad wording or poor descriptions of the problem statement.

The prompts have a good intention, but a prompt can be ignored. We should be taking a person under 1,000 rep through a hand-holding process that cannot be ignored and may result in the user getting an answer without ever having to type details.

The other problem with prompts is perceived investment, the Sunk Cost fallacy. Once a user has started typing in the form, they are less likely to discard that work in response to a prompt because they feel they've already invested too much to back out. It is easier to just ignore the prompt and post the question.

So, we should collect the title first, then do a title search (backed by a more effective search mechanism) and make them look at answers that have similar titles before they ever get a giant textbox begging for words to be typed:

Once they've passed that gate keeper, instead of passive prompts we should directly ask the user for the information that we want. One giant textbox invites free-form writing when what we want is focused and categorical information:

... the point here is instead of putting even more information on the screen at once, we're slowing things down, asking the right questions in the right order, and at the same time teaching the user how to break down their problem in a way that lends itself to analysis.